Friday, May 30, 2014

Some notes on my bash and git setup

As much as I like IntelliJ and its git integration, it makes me feel like I'm just dealing with the tip of the git-iceberg. So I like to try and use the command line as much as possible as a way to increase my understanding of git and all the mad-clever things it can do. That's led me to want command line completion, including for git-flow, (and if you're not using git-flow, why? ;-) visibility of what branch I'm on in my prompt and a few aliases and other configuration items to make things easier. It's actually not all that much but it's made a big difference to me.

Here's what the salient parts of my ~/.bash_profile and ~/.gitconfig look like:

The git ls alias is a succinct answer to, "What's been committed lately?" at a high level. It simply lists the hash, how long ago it was committed, by whom and the commit message. I find it useful with --no-merges (which unsurprisingly omits merge commits from the output) and --author=<author> to limit things to just my work. It helps you answer the questions, "When did I commit feature X?" and "What did do lately?" The git ll variation gives a little more detail by listing the files changed along with an indication of the type and size of change. Useful when the commit message alone doesn't help me answer "What did I do lately?" ;-)

Spending more time in a console made me want to be more adept at editing commands here too; I had for years made do with Home and End and the arrow keys. I even increased my key repeat rate to speed up moving back to correct errors with the left-arrow key. Now I've added the couple things I really needed to improve things:

Enabling vi mode; I knew about this, but hadn't found myself on the command line quite enough to care about it until recently. (Vi is another thing like to "make" myself use just because proficiency in it just seems to really pay dividends).

Figuring out how to navigate back and forward one word at a time while editing a command -- crucial for crazy long commands

Monday, May 19, 2014

Changing jobs and finding myself doing a lot more in the shell has had me tweaking my working environment a fair bit lately. Part of this involved wanting to highlight matches when using grep since I found myself grepping more in the last few weeks than the entire year prior to that.

The most pedestrian way of doing this is to invoke grep with the --color option, which according to man grep may be set to "never", "always" or "auto". What it fails to point out is the important difference between "always" and "auto" (more of which later) but having experimented briefly with "always" and seen what I expected I proceeded with the assumption that it was a perfectly reasonable way to do things.

The prospect of typing --color=always all the time was not appealing however, and so after a quick search I hit upon the fact that one can set the environment variable GREP_OPTIONS to contain options to be passed when grep is invoked. My .bash_profile was swiftly modified to include export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=always'. And everything was good.

Except not really.

Later that week I was experimenting with some things from an old BASH book I had hanging around the house for years but never really dug into. One of said things was a function to create an ls command that filtered by date. Call it lsd (the book did) and it'd work thus:

> lsd 'may 18'May 11 10:01 foo-reportMay 11 10:42 cats.db

Except the weird part is that it didn't quite work right for me. The function was defined like this:

date=$1ls -l | grep -i "^.\{38\}$date" | cut -c39-

For the uninitiated, that cut command is saying to cut the output from column 39 on through to the end of the line, the idea being to transform the regular output from ls -l which looks like this:

to the shortened date/filename form. Column 39 being where the date part starts. What was weird though was that my output didn't seem to be cutting in the right place. I found I had to cut further to the right, which at the time puzzled me, but not enough to spend enough cycles thinking about why this might be.

The following week I was tooling around with git flow since it seems like feature branches are the order of the day at the new gig (and doing it all through IntelliJ makes me feel like a charlatan). It seems pretty damn good too, although there was a rather obnoxious amount of typing involved such as git flow feature start foo-feature just to get working on a new feature. I suspected some command line completion magick was available and indeed it is.

Here's when things got weird, although I had no clue this was related to --color=always at this point. It seemed as though, suddenly, my git command completion was hosed, big time. One or two things worked, but much did not. Typing git following by some double-tab action to show possible completions revealed the reason why:

Yup, almost all the subcommands were funky like this. No wonder I couldn't choose between checkout and cherry-pick. Neither of them began with ch anymore...

Believing git flow completion to be the culprit, I googled along those lines. Luckily I turned up one (and only one!) page of interest, where somebody else reported the same symptoms, and a day later that they'd determined the following line in their bash configuration was the culprit: alias egrep='egrep --color=always'

Alarm bells rang. I remembered that I'd recently set things up so my grep command would be invoked with --color=always; I even had this vague recollection that I'd read always meant that when the output was piped to another command the color-inducing control characters would be passed along too. By contrast, auto would only include those color control characters when the results of grepping were destined for immediate output on screen.

I unset my GREP_OPTIONS variable et voila, suddenly it all worked as it should. A quick look at the git completion script confirmed that grep is used in there, explaining to my satisfaction why --color=always was screwing things up.

Since this was such an evil little trap I thought it was worth blogging about. Maybe it'll save somebody else from suffering this confusing problem.